Announcing general availability of the Office 365 Centralized Deployment service

Office add-ins help Office users to personalize their work experience and streamline data access. Late last year, we announced the Centralized Deployment service in preview, which allows administrators to deploy Office web add-ins. Today, we are excited to announce general availability of Centralized Deployment.

From the Office 365 admin center or by using PowerShell scripts, administrators can deploy Office web add-ins to individual users, groups or an organization with ease, using Centralized Deployment. Users can simply open Office applications—such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint on Windows, Mac or Office Online—to see the add-ins installed on their ribbon. This allows organizations—large and small—to easily extend Office with high-value services across all platforms.

Add-ins built internally for use within an organization, as well as add-ins from the Office Store or Microsoft AppSource, can be deployed using Centralized Deployment to tenants worldwide.

“With Office 365 Centralized Deployment, we could deploy Qorus easily to our global user base, and the process is transparent to users. When they open Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, they find the add-in already installed.”—Eric Jacobs, Genetec

Q. How do I know if my organization is set up for Centralized Deployment?

A. Centralized Deployment requires a recent version of Microsoft Office and OAuth enabled version of Exchange. IT admins can run a quick test to ensure compatibility and determine if their organization has the correct configuration prior to getting started. Learn more about configuration requirements and try the compatibility add-in.

Q. What languages and worldwide Office data centers are supported?

A. Today, we have worldwide support for Centralized Deployment for all supported Office languages. We also support the Microsoft Office sovereign datacenters for Germany, with support for Chinese sovereign deployment coming later in the year.

Q. What type of deployment telemetry is available?

A. Telemetry will be available shortly for IT admins to see data about deployments and usage in reports in the Office 365 admin center, and for developers to see their add-in deployments in the Office ISV Seller Dashboard, their developer portal.

Q. Can IT admins and users turn off add-ins?

A. IT admins may turn on or off the add-ins they deploy for all users from the Office 365 admin center. Soon, we will support the ability for users turn off add-ins that are deployed to them, so they are no longer shown on the Office applications ribbon.

Q. How do I deploy Outlook add-ins?

A. Centralized Deployment currently supports Word, Excel and PowerPoint add-ins on Windows, Mac or Office Online. Today, you can deploy Outlook add-ins from the Exchange management pages. This experience will merge with Centralized Deployment shortly.

POPULAR CATEGORY

ITBankNews is the IT Financial sector magazine used by millions of people everyday.
It’s the one place to keep up on all your interests – reading and sharing stories you care about has never been easier.